Bus Driver Jim has been an eclectic computer programmer and photographer since the early seventies. A recent twenty year stint in the transportation industry has earned him the handle and this blog is a documentary of his life and travels.

Microslop

One day back in the very early nineties I was out on a charter boat in Puget Sound WA, salmon fishing with a couple of guys named Mark. One was the guy who wrote PC Paintbrush and the other was the CEO of his graphics company, ZSoft. They were in town for a big meeting with Microsoft over in Redmond and decided to grab their West Coast scanner developer (me) and get in some fishing beforehand.

The next day they dropped by my place in Kent after their meeting and installed some proprietary software on my computer, given to them by Microsoft. It was the beta version of Windows 3.1, the multitasking beauty that changed computing forever. I just wanted to establish my cred here before I start dissing Microsoft.

I initially went with the default Win 10 install on my new box but after a lot of crap uninstalls and heavy tweaking I broke their Store which meant I couldn’t download the new driving game (Forza Horizon 3) that I bought on sale from them. So, I just formatted the SID and installed a squeaky clean version of Windows 10, which I should have just done in the first place.

Two things have occurred which has prompted this post. First off, I used PayPal to buy the game. That’s my slush fund for incidentals and I use it a lot. This morning I discovered that Microsoft bypassed PayPal and went straight into my checking account (which is linked to PayPal) and deducted the money from there instead! Are you kidding me!!! I didn’t even know that was possible.

Than, while I was downloading the game, I noticed that they had slipped in a couple of other downloads that I didn’t request, CandyCrush and MineSweeper. Again, are you kidding me!!! Obviously I canceled them but what the hell is going on with Microsoft?